Krishna explaining to Arjuna that he must fight as caste and karmic duty (illustration for a nineteenth-century edition of the Bhagavad Gita)
At several points in my life, I’ve encountered ideas or experiences that have galvanized my thinking and reorganized my life, if only temporarily, around them. I felt this way when I read the Bhagavad Gita in my early twenties: when Prince Arjuna throws down his arms on the battlefield, horrified by the death and destruction his participation in Kurukshetra War will inevitably cause, and is then bucked up by the god Krishna’s advice that though the body dies the soul carries on, I found it intensely liberating. This, I thought, must be the truth, because it feels right.
I felt this way again when I performed my first principal role in an opera. I was working with a director who taught singers a way of moving on stage that made it appear as if the music was coming out of you: you ended up learning the music so well, including the orchestral parts and all the the other roles, that your gestures deliberately anticipated every musical phrase, giving a beautiful sense of naturalness and flow to this least natural of the arts. The morning after opening night, I was so filled with joy at the rightness of it that I literally rolled around on the floor like a puppy in the guest home where I was staying. This, I thought, is IT.
Earlier, as an undergraduate, I had discovered the literary-critical theory of post-structuralism. Reading Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida not only made me feel smart. It also provided me with an entirely new framework for reading literary texts, hearing language, and understanding social systems. There was no fixed meaning anywhere; words meant radically different things dependent on the relative power position of the writer or speaker; reality itself was contingent.
Jacques Derrida, celebrity intellectual
In a certain sense, my post-structuralist phase and my Bhagavad Gita phase dovetailed nicely. The god Krishna explains to Arjuna, in a nutshell, that human actions are constrained by one’s caste- and karmically-ordained duty, so it’s pointless to feel bad about the shitty things you do. Derrida et al. suggested a similar kind of fatalism: the “text” — i.e. the book, the film, the building, the government — was so essentially unstable that eventually all constructed meaning would crumble away. I found both Hindu and post-structuralist philosophies to be intensely liberatory: they pointed to a future of total freedom, where the individual would be freed to create both his own identity, and all manner of radical new systems wherein the unfettered rights of people to do what they wanted was all but guaranteed.
The post-structuralist belief in the withering away of the text corresponds to the classical Marxist belief in the withering away of the state, so it’s easy to see how the literary and political theories became conflated. In truth, though, post-structuralism and classical Marxism have very little in common. Post-structuralism wields the surgical scalpel against discrete fragments — atoms, even — of texts, lives, and societies, while Marxism’s tools are more on the level of giant earth-moving machines. Post-structuralism is concerned with the hidden lives of words and individuals, Marxism with vast international economic structures. Post-structuralism turns the gaze inward, Marxism outward. Post-structuralism is radically individualist, Marxism radically communitarian. And so on.
In my undergraduate days, I thought that reading post-structuralism signaled my superior smarts. Although the hoi polloi would eventually, somehow, be liberated by it, theory was not really for them. It was for us. And although we would be the radically liberatory force for good, making all things new, our efforts would never really go outside of the academy. After all, we still needed clothes, cars, houses, and cheap consumer goods, and someone had to produce them. Radical social change was a glacial, centuries-long process, so what can you do?
I admit that I find myself shocked at the speed with which these ideas have now burst from their more or less safe containment in the universities into the mainstream public sphere. Andrea Long Chu’s much-discussed cover story in New York magazine (that bastion of bourgeois aspirationalism) — “Freedom of Sex: The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies” — is the most salient recent example. Chu argues that not just trans kids, but all people everywhere “should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” and declares (without evidence), “The good news is that millions of people already believe [this].”
Chu explains: “The right to change sex includes the right to receive counseling, to understand the risks, or to be treated for comorbidities; in fact, society has a duty to make these resources freely and widely accessible to trans kids.” She laments that “trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians,” and exhorts these parents to “learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.” She elaborates:
The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it . . where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. . . If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will.
I wrote earlier about Chu’s polemic as a radical departure from the received injunction to “Protect Trans Kids.” Crucially, Chu is arguing that trans kids should not be protected: that all guardrails should be removed when a child of any age declares her wish to adopt the synthetically-mediated appearance or culturally-constructed habits of the opposite sex. Children’s freedom, she asserts, depends on their being allowed to contend, before they’re developmentally equipped to do so, with adult ideas, structures, and sexual practices. It’s a far cry from the idea of children’s liberation propagated by my childhood favorite, Free to Be You and Me: a pastoral vision of a land where “the horses run free . . . through the green country.”
This is one of the the aspects of Chu’s argument that should trouble us most: the push for the destruction of childhood as protected realm of innocence. As Matt Taibbi put it, tongue only half in cheek:
In fact, Andrea Long Chu and her supporters wish to adultify children — a much-decried social practice that, a few minutes ago, I understood to be rooted in anti-Black racism. Did New York’s editors not consider the racist implications of their obvious Pulitzer grab? Or has the middle-brow intelligentsia moved on from its preoccupation with racial justice, towards the newer, far more radical project of liberating children from childhood itself?
On the other hand, perhaps Chu and her editors are fluent in the current scholarship on childhood innocence as a white supremacist construct, and therefore think adultification for all children is a way to level the playing field — sort of like the San Francisco Unified School District, in a now-reversed policy, did by abolishing the teaching of algebra in the eighth grade, because early algebra classes skewed predominantly white and Asian. If only some people get the good things, the thinking goes, no one should get them.
The weakness of Chu’s argument, and of the arguments of the childhood liberationists in general, is in their failure to articulate exactly what the good things are. Is childhood innocence a good thing, because children are developmentally unready to handle the responsibilities of the adult world, or a bad thing, because it’s mostly white or highly-resourced children who get to experience it? Are efforts to minimize children’s trauma and distress a good thing — again, because children are poorly-equipped to contend with trauma and distress — or a bad thing, because so many poor children, immigrant children, and children of color have to? Is the coercion of children towards the roles and behaviors of adults a good thing, because it is commonplace among fashionably non-nuclear families, or a bad thing, because it hurts children?
Since post-structuralism and its claim that meaning is contingent escaped from the academy, we are living in a world where it’s considered suspect to care about children’s actual safety. As the internet trope goes, “fuck them kids”; only now our social betters mean it literally as well as figuratively.